What is a Hacker?

Brian HarveyUniversity of California, Berkeley

In one sense it's silly to argue about the ``true'' meaning of a word. A
word means whatever people use it to mean. I am not the Academie
Française; I can't force Newsweek to use the word ``hacker''
according to my official definition.

Still, understanding the etymological history of the word ``hacker''
may help in understanding the current social situation.

The concept of hacking entered the computer culture at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in the 1960s. Popular opinion at MIT posited
that there are two kinds of students, tools and hackers. A ``tool''
is someone who attends class regularly, is always to be found in the
library when no class is meeting, and gets straight As. A ``hacker''
is the opposite: someone who never goes to class, who in fact sleeps
all day, and who spends the night pursuing recreational activities
rather than studying. There was thought to be no middle ground.

What does this have to do with computers? Originally, nothing.
But there are standards for success as a hacker, just as grades form
a standard for success as a tool. The true hacker can't just sit
around all night; he must pursue some hobby with dedication and flair.
It can be telephones, or railroads (model, real, or both), or science
fiction fandom, or ham radio, or broadcast radio. It can be more
than one of these. Or it can be computers. [In 1986, the word
``hacker'' is generally used among MIT students to refer not to
computer hackers but to building hackers, people who explore roofs and
tunnels where they're not supposed to be.]

A ``computer hacker,'' then, is someone who lives and breathes
computers, who knows all about computers, who can get a computer to
do anything. Equally important, though, is the hacker's attitude.
Computer programming must be a hobby, something done for fun, not
out of a sense of duty or for the money. (It's okay to make money,
but that can't be the reason for hacking.)

A hacker is an aesthete.

There are specialties within computer hacking. An algorithm
hacker knows all about the best algorithm for any problem. A system
hacker knows about designing and maintaining operating systems. And
a ``password hacker'' knows how to find out someone else's password.
That's what Newsweek should be calling them.

Someone who sets out to crack the security of a system for financial gain is
not a hacker at all. It's not that a hacker can't be a thief, but a hacker
can't be a professional thief. A hacker must be fundamentally an
amateur, even though hackers can get paid for their expertise. A password
hacker whose primary interest is in learning how the system works doesn't
therefore necessarily refrain from stealing information or services, but
someone whose primary interest is in stealing isn't a hacker. It's a matter
of emphasis.

Ethics and Aesthetics

Throughout most of the history of the human race, right and wrong were
relatively easy concepts. Each person was born into a particular social
role, in a particular society, and what to do in any situation was part of
the traditional meaning of the role. This social destiny was backed up by
the authority of church or state.

This simple view of ethics was destroyed about 200 years ago,
most notably by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant is in many ways the
inventor of the 20th Century. He rejected the ethical force of tradition,
and created the modern idea of autonomy. Along with this radical
idea, he introduced the centrality of rational thought as both the
glory and the obligation of human beings. There is a paradox in Kant:
Each person makes free, autonomous choices, unfettered by outside
authority, and yet each person is compelled by the demands of rationality
to accept Kant's ethical principle, the Categorical Imperative. This
principle is based on the idea that what is ethical for an individual
must be generalizable to everyone.

Modern cognitive psychology is based on Kant's ideas. Central
to the functioning of the mind, most people now believe, is information
processing and rational argument. Even emotions, for many psychologists,
are a kind of theorem based on reasoning from data. Kohlberg's theory
of moral development interprets
moral weakness as cognitive weakness, the inability to understand
sophisticated moral reasoning, rather than as a failure of will.
Disputed questions of ethics, like abortion, are debated as if they
were questions of fact, subject to rational proof.

Since Kant, many philosophers have refined his work, and many
others have disagreed with it. For our purpose, understanding what
a hacker is, we must consider one of the latter, Sören Kierkegaard
(1813-1855). A Christian who hated the established churches, Kierkegaard
accepted Kant's radical idea of personal autonomy. But he rejected
Kant's conclusion that a rational person is necessarily compelled
to follow ethical principles. In the book Either-Or he presents a
dialogue between two people. One of them accepts Kant's ethical point
of view. The other takes an aesthetic point of view: what's important
in life is immediate experience.

The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic
is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice
whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. At the
heart of the aesthetic way of life, as Kierkegaard characterises
it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present
experience. The paradigm of aesthetic expression is the romantic
lover who is immersed in his own passion. By contrast the
paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment
and obligation through time, in which the present is bound
by the past and to the future. Each of the two ways of life
is informed by different concepts, incompatible attitudes,
rival premises. [MacIntyre, p. 39]

Kierkegaard's point is that no rational argument can convince us to
follow the ethical path. That decision is a radically free choice.
He is not, himself, neutral about it; he wants us to choose the ethical.
But he wants us to understand that we do have a real choice to make.
The basis of his own choice, of course, was Christian faith. That's
why he sees a need for religious conviction even in the post-Kantian
world. But the ethical choice can also be based on a secular humanist
faith.

A lesson on the history of philosophy may seem out of place in
a position paper by a computer scientist about a pragmatic problem.
But Kierkegaard, who lived a century before the electronic computer,
gave us the most profound understanding of what a hacker is. A hacker
is an aesthete.

The life of a true hacker is episodic, rather than planned.
Hackers create ``hacks.'' A hack can be anything from a practical joke
to a brilliant new computer program. (VisiCalc was a great hack.
Its imitators are not hacks.) But whatever it is, a good hack must
be aesthetically perfect. If it's a joke, it must be a complete one.
If you decide to turn someone's dorm room upside-down, it's not enough
to epoxy the furniture to the ceiling. You must also epoxy the pieces
of paper to the desk.

Steven Levy, in the book Hackers, talks at length about what
he calls the ``hacker ethic.'' This phrase is very misleading. What
he has discovered is the Hacker Aesthetic, the standards for art criticism
of hacks. For example, when Richard Stallman says that information
should be given out freely, his opinion is not based on a notion of
property as theft, which (right or wrong) would be an ethical position.
His argument is that keeping information secret is inefficient; it
leads to unaesthetic duplication of effort.

The original hackers at MIT-AI were mostly undergraduates, in
their late teens or early twenties. The aesthetic viewpoint is quite
appropriate to people of that age. An epic tale of passionate love
between 20-year-olds can be very moving. A tale of passionate love
between 40-year-olds is more likely to be comic. To embrace the aesthetic
life is not to embrace evil; hackers need not be enemies of society.
They are young and immature, and should be protected for their own
sake as well as ours.

In practical terms, the problem of providing moral education to hackers is
the same as the problem of moral education in general. Real people are not
wholly ethical or wholly aesthetic; they shift from one viewpoint to
another. (They may not recognize the shifts. That's why Levy says
``ethic'' when talking about an aesthetic.) Some tasks in moral education
are to raise the self-awareness of the young, to encourage their developing
ethical viewpoint, and to point out gently and lovingly the situations in
which their aesthetic impulses work against their ethical standards.